In games like ROM City Rampage, you can only see one side of the building. In my game, you should be able to enter all sides of the building. I'm not sure how to draw the building then. I'm thinking about whether the map should have a 16x16 or a 32x32 block resolution. The game isn't for the NES, but for a DIY gaming console called Pokitto which has a 220x178 resolution if I'm not mistaken. The game is an RPG in which you can enter buildings by walking on the map, but when you enter the building, it turns into a 2D platformer like in Zelda 2. Since the map is based on a real city in which there can be buildings facing any direction, the player should be able to enter any of them from any direction and see their front face even if it faces north. So I'm thinking about if a building's block should be a square split into 4 triangles for each side of the building and have a smaller square in the middle for the roof; it would look like SMB1 stairway blocks in SMB1. I just hope it doesn't look messy. Chained buildings would have the intersecting sides removed and connected via the smaller square in the middle which stretches into a rectangle.

You could do something like how the game Prison Architect does it? In that picture, they show the building interior, but you could just cover it with roof, but still leaving the sides and doors visible?

The pros: -Pushes the limit of what is expected from a perspective standpoint on the nes.-Gives a nice sense of depth-Can help tell the player something about the height axis-You can place points of interest in more varied locations than in the JRPG perspective-More easily enables tactical level layouts compared to the JRPG perspective

The cons-Will require another layer of cases in your map drawing algorithm, if you use one, or if the screens are hand-drawn and hard-coded, they will be prone to the human factor (bending perspective rules by mistake).-Moving Sprites either have to 1) beconfined to a floor-level 2d plane, 2)break perspective noticeably, or 3)have lots of work done to them, graphics and code wise.

Because of the cons, we might actually roll back to the classic JRPG perspective, depending on how it goes. We'll need to factor in time, convenience, to some extent cpu bandwidth. and if the wow-factor is large enough. We've already rolled back some ROM expenses in the form of another nuance of perspective, taking up another subset of tiles. That adds up when having multiple sceneries. In one end, JRPG perspectives are the simplest things that could possibly work, and in the other, it has been done so many times that you need to go further in order to succeed making something fresh.

Other things to note:-The perspective and scale must be made to match the active play area. If 1 screen with screen by screen switching/scrolling when trespassing borders, no problem. If for example 2x2 free-scroll screens, you need to scale the perspective accordingly.

This mockup has been through quite a few iterations in a short development cycle, with the perspectives changing. I plan to do a full writeup comparing snapshots once the design has solidified enough.

What i meant with "classic JRPG" was a forced perspective where you see front and top of a cube, but not the sides.

This is what i call Cross-sectional perspective, which is what the project in its current shape is approximating, but with compromises due to level drawing complexity, storage, attribute grid, and sprite handling. Hypothetically, a truer form of cross-sectional would require many attribute masking sprites, subsequently locking a sprite subpalette, a more careful/constricted layout, and Solstice-like sprite masking tricks, which amounts to an enormous task.

An earlier iteration had more trapezoid elements, like zelda 1, 3 and so on, but it didn't work out for the intended design goals.

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